


The Bite of the Apple

by trifles



Category: The Wicker Man (1973)
Genre: Embarrassment, F/M, Fictional Religion & Theology, Heteronormativity, Heterosexual Sex, Homoeroticism, Inappropriate use of the socratic method, M/M, Religious Conflict, Religious Content, Religious Discussion, Sensory Overload, uncomfortable attraction toward your basic folk horror cult leader
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:02:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28188138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trifles/pseuds/trifles
Summary: "And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked"Sergeant Howie and Lord Summerisle, on their first walk, and the sound of one man's convictions being tested.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 32
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Bite of the Apple

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wolf_of_Lilacs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_of_Lilacs/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Wolf_of_Lilacs! Please excuse any errors in both the Church of Scotland marriage ceremony and Scots Gaelic language. Also, if you want a reference for what the children are singing at the end... it's Fairport Convention's [Bonny Black Hare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY3o7WZ1Uao), which originally was going to have a much larger part in this story (as was rather a lot of other trad folk revival music). Still, I'm pleased with where this went, and I hope you are, too. Enjoy!

It was never quiet on this damnable island. There was a sound -- one Neil couldn’t quite identify, but that seemed to creep about him at the very lowest pitch. It twisted under his skin and raised the hair on his arms. The sound was like some dreadful beast stitched together out of the roar of the sea, the rustle of leaves, the breaths of the landlord’s daughter audible through wood and plaster and a betrothed man’s solid resolve. It entered him. It unnerved him.

“I’m rather fond of it, myself.”

Neil blinked and looked at Lord Summerisle. The man had walked ahead a little in the apple grove, the private garden of his lordship. Lord Summerisle smiled slightly, watching Neil focus again. “But then,” he continued, “it would be rather a poor thing if I didn’t care for my own people’s exports, wouldn’t you agree?”

Neil wondered, not for the first time, why a man who claimed to love his father’s land had spent enough years away from it to get himself a Sassenach’s accent.

“As you say, your lordship.” They had been talking about the harvest. Why had Neil been distracted? Then-- it came again.

This time Neil did turn and look around himself, seeking the source of the sound. “Ah,” said Lord Summerisle. “Yes, I imagine you might be able to still hear the hymns from here. What extraordinary senses you must have, Sergeant.”

Neil could not, in fact, hear whatever pagan nonsense the youths were singing now. Not entirely. Just that-- that _sound._

Perhaps, he wondered feverishly, it was just sinfulness made audible.

Neil didn’t like Lord Summerisle. He didn’t like many people, truth be told, Susan being the exception – though she’d been an exception for coming up on five years’ worth of engagement, and Neil was for the moment firmly ignoring any inner voice that suggested that perhaps he didn’t like her all that much either. But his lordship had a particular-- profanity to him. Not in the mundane sense, like a schoolboy caught swearing. The true meaning of profane. That which defiled the sacred.

It wasn’t anything his lordship expressly _did,_ aside from host this Dark Ages bacchanalia, and perhaps that would more than account for it. But it was like that sound. His calm, educated, amused explanations turned his actions from ridiculous to reasonable, and in the process gave Neil both a headache and a dread of what else his lordship might make sound _sensible_ _._

No, he didn’t like Lord Summerisle, and he didn’t like this island, and he didn’t like being invaded through skin and soul every damned second he was here.

“How can you stand it?” Neil asked, and rather wished he hadn’t.

Lord Summerisle tilted his face to the sky. The man was older than Neil, but when he closed his eyes against the bright sunlight, he seemed to catch a glow that took years from him. His lordship’s hair was wastrel long and he was too tall, standing over Neil like a man cozying up to some High Street leodag even when he was several feet away and, actually, now sitting down on a bench beneath one of his apple trees, gesturing for Neil to join him.

Neil did not wish to join him. And yet he sat regardless. On the other end of the bench.

“Tell me, Sergeant,” his lordship said, hands on his knees as he leaned toward Neil. His eyes were open again, sparking with interest and darkly penetrating. “Do you or do you not consider the education of children to be an important matter?”

By God and Jesus Christ’s own name, Neil Howie did not want to sit and play Socratic method with this madman. Bees buzzed above them, and the air smelled of salt and wildflowers on the bloom. “I do, of course I do,” he said.

“Very good,” said his lordship. “Would it surprise you to know that our hymns contain not only religious matters, but are themselves educational? That they ready our youth for the issues they will face as they grow into their majority?”

“Lord Summerisle, if the examples I’ve heard are any indication, I would think you preparing them for, for--”

His lordship’s smile was like a snare, waiting for the rabbit to come close. “Yes, Sergeant?”

Neil wouldn’t be caught. He _wouldn’t._ “You know very well what, your lordship.”

Lord Summerisle tapped his fingers on his knees -- another sound, light and fleshy. “All right, then tell me this. I understand that you are to be married, Sergeant. You have my congratulations. Have you set a date?”

It wouldn’t do to wonder how his lordship knew. The island was small, and Neil was a stranger. He probably had no secrets here. He should’ve remembered that before he’d ever stepped foot on the shore. “Not yet, your lordship. Soon, I hope.”

“And I am given to understand that you are... unfamiliar with the more sacred aspects of marital union.”

Neil very much did not appreciate where this was going. “I’m sure I don’t know to what you’re referring, Lord Summerisle.”

“Come, we are men of the world, surely.” The wind, sea-crusted, rustled through the man’s hair and flickered the lapel of his jacket. “I know that in your Christian beliefs there is a certain value given to withholding yourself from that which the gods gave you. As you’ve surely come to realize, the same does not hold true for us. It is a-- a calling, if you will. A duty. Even science tells us this -- two animals that are not meant to consummate cannot breed true. And yet every human in this world can mate with any other and bear fruit. It is what we are meant to do, and it would be a slight to the gods to withhold ourselves from that worship.”

“But we are not animals, _sir,”_ Neil said. “And we must hold ourselves to a greater standard, as God himself holds us to His!”

“You are a delight, Sergeant,” Lord Summerisle said. “I feel myself quite back in the school room, learning all over again the follies of the outside world and how much better off we are here. Do you love your fiancee, Sergeant?”

Neil felt every stitch of his uniform, pressing in. Carving closer to where his minds-eye Susan waited, wondering the same. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

“As you should, man, as you should. And when you marry her, you’ll do so in your church, and the minister there will read out the statements that define what a marriage will mean between you and your beloved. Let me see, how does it go... ‘The companionship and comfort of marriage enable the full expression of physical love between husband and wife.’ Yes. He will say that, in front of your future wife and every man and woman you care about in this world. And so I confront you now, privately, in this peaceful place, so that you do not have to be ashamed before your god: Do you know, do you really _know,_ how your fingers might move, your mouth might worship, your cock harden and fill and receive its benediction within the clasp of its intended sheath?”

Jesus _Christ._ “Enough!” Neil was standing, and when had that happened? His lungs ached, air rushing too quickly in and out, and the island’s sound was like a ringing in his ears, rhythmic and shrill and threading through his body in numbing streaks of heat. “You haven’t the right. I won’t be spoken to in this way. I won’t.”

Lord Summerisle leaned back, spreading his arms across the back of the bench. Stretching out, wider and wider, as if he could touch the entire island if he wished it. He considered Neil, that luring smile back in place. “You don’t know. You haven’t been taught, and by your reckoning it was no one’s duty to do so -- certainly not your religion’s. Somehow, you think, it will all turn out all right. It has for every generation up to now, and will do so for every generation after.”

In the distance, words. Song. Neil could finally hear the children singing.

“But,” said Lord Summerisle, “you will be miserable, and your wife will cry herself to sleep every time you bumble your way through another silent copulation, and it all could have been avoided if someone, anyone, had given you even the smallest of educations." He sighed sadly, but it was just another sound. "May the children of Summerisle," he said, "never have to suffer from such ignorance.”

His lordship pushed himself up from the bench, and gestured down the path. “Shall we?” he said, and walked on.

Neil, blinking in the sun and the hot horror of the moment, dared not try and discern the children's words floating through the grove. He could not. He would go mad if he did, as mad as a hare trapped by his lordship’s smile.

He let their piping voices sink instead into the steady, soul-stealing sound of Summerisle, and followed where he was led.


End file.
